Hmm, we may mean different things. For me it was the secret clans and awesome ninja powers that felt very romanticized. As for the low status of women I can't remember it leaping off the page in the first two books and I never continued past them - but it was many years ago I read those books. As for brutality in feudal Japan, that's not exactly an unusual trope. What little I remember of the old Shogun series was also pretty brutal.